[ISN] Interview with Place Hacker: Hacking skyscrapers to exploit physical security holes

http://blogs.computerworld.com/20010/interview_with_place_hacker_hacking_skyscrapers_to_exploit_physical_security_holes

By Darlene Storm
Security Is Sexy
Computerworld
April 10, 2012

Hackers come in all shapes and sizes as well as flavors of what they 
like to hack, web applications, servers and even lock-picking to name 
but a few. Besides an insatiable curiosity, most hackers take words like 
'inaccessible' as a thrown gauntlet of challenge and 'unhackable' as a 
dare. "Get in. Get it done. Get out." Or "leave no trace or trail that 
you came and conquered" are game plans that apply to hackers of the 
digital realm as well as a different type of hacker. Roof and tunnel 
hacking started at MIT, as did an infamous lock picking book, but soon 
urban explorers picked up their cameras and the urbex flag to conquer 
the physical security challenges of rooftopping and of tunneling 
(underground utility tunnels).

Hackers don't let something like “unauthorized exploration is 
prohibited” stop them. Urban explorers are like hackers, according to 
Dr. Bradley L. Garrett who wrote:

     The argument that I want to put forward here is that urban
     explorers, in the hacking tradition, hack or exploit fractures in
     physical architecture and social expectations in an effort to find
     deeper meanings and different readings in places even as they
     preference process over results. This practice, rather than being
     strictly oppositional, is actually quite celebratory; it is a
     method of affecting desire through unencumbered play that creates
     a meld between body and city, representations and practice,
     explorers and place and, of course, between fellow trespassers.

Dr. Garrett, a 31-year-old man from Los Angeles, completed his PhD 
thesis on perhaps the coolest topic ever, "Place Hacking: Tales of Urban 
Exploration" [PDF]. Urban explorers do seem a bit like penetration 
testers. "We do not break anything, we do not alter anything, 90% of the 
time no-one even knows we have been in and out of the place," Garrett 
said.

[...]

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